Could Canada be pulled deeper into the war in Iraq?

iPolitics Insights

Our relationship with the Kurds makes us a regional player — like it or not

Hundreds of civilians flee villages outside Mosul the day after Iraqi Kurdish forces launch an operation east of Islamic State-held Mosul on Monday, Aug. 15, 2016. The Kurdish forces known as the Peshmerga say they have retaken 12 villages in the operation in an effort to encircle the city. (AP Photo/Susannah George)

In an age when democracies prefer not to appoint professional soldiers as their defence ministers (on Clemenceau’s principle that “war is too important to be left to the generals”), retired Lt.-Col. Harjit Sajjan is beginning to look like a good choice for the job.

That he speaks his mind has been obvious for some time; there have been a few hints of differences of opinion between him and some of his colleagues over Canada’s military role in the world. He’s been very forthright about the challenges involved in Canada’s quest for a ‘peacekeeping’ role. “Even using the terminology of peacekeeping is not valid at this time,” he said recently. That comment by itself was a service to this country, whether Canadians want to believe it or not.

And if you choose as your minister of defence a professional with, among other things, three tours of Afghanistan under his belt, it’s usually a good idea to listen to him. This week, Sajjan has come up with some numbers for the type of force that might be deployable on a projected ‘peace support’ mission, but the Trudeau government still has to name an objective.

That may be just as well, because events of the past week in northern Iraq are making it much more likely that the objective might have to be somewhere that Canadian troops already are — around Mosul. And that could pose more problems for the government than anyone anticipates.

ISIL is falling apart. That may sound like wishful thinking, and the statement itself says nothing about whether or how it might re-emerge or reconfigure itself, but it’s losing ground militarily both in Iraq and in Syria and is beginning to lose whatever cohesion it once had as a presumptive state actor.

Military turnarounds often happen quickly in history. On June 22, 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, he was seen to be winning. Exactly three years later, when the Soviet operation called ‘The Destruction of Army Group Centre’ got underway, it was clear that Germany was losing, though no one would have predicted a timeframe for its fall. With ISIL, in the past six months analysts have moved from extreme caution (“The Islamic State is far from defeated” — Stratfor, March 7) to qualified optimism (“Under attack on multiple fronts, the Islamic State is quickly losing ground” — Stratfor, August 12).

Our big problem is that, inadvertently or not, we have taken sides in an ongoing regional conflict.

Also, its controlling core is beginning to leak. On August 16, Foreign Policy published a breakthrough piece of journalism by the reputable Dubai journalist team of Jenan Moussa and Harald Doornbos — a lengthy and penetrating interview with an ISIL insider who (incredibly) remains in place. ISIL troop strengths are notoriously hard to come by, but they seem to be decreasing even as small-group terrorist strikes in the region increase.

Mosul, which ISIL took in June 2014 when it first burst out of obscurity, is now looking more and more like one of their last bastions, and it may come under direct attack in the not-too-distant future. Analysts had been citing ‘sometime in 2017’ as a target for Mosul’s capture, but with local successes in the area and farther south, the pace may accelerate.

Mosul is a major city with an estimated civilian population of a million still in it — people who are prevented from leaving by its occupiers and face the combined forces of Iraqis, Kurds and Shi’a militias. Refugee camps near the city are already jammed.

It would seem well suited to a Canadian humanitarian endeavour — but there are several problems with that idea.

Whether the fall of Mosul is accomplished by a fast, violent assault (and “fast” is a very relative term in these conditions) or by slow siege (which implies starvation before assault), civilian casualties are likely to be horrific. There’s little a humanitarian effort could accomplish in a last-ditch defence (though the UN agencies are at least attempting to create a relief structure) — but even that is not Canada’s big problem.

Our big problem is that, inadvertently or not, we have taken sides in an ongoing regional conflict. Canada has been working with a Kurdish faction, under the fig-leaf (which the whole Coalition adopts) of supporting the Iraqi government in Baghdad. The reckoning in Ottawa as recently as mid-May was that our direct involvement in a training and mentoring role with the Kurds would be safe enough because they were judged unlikely to take part in an attack on Mosul itself. “The Kurds are the wrong flavour for Mosul,” one source said at the time. But that reckoning may have to change.

It has become increasingly clear that the centuries-old ethnic status quo in northern Iraq and Mosul has been erased. Even as Mosul falls, its status will be disputed among all actors — local, regional and global — while the Kurdish struggle for independence, with its own built-in factionalisms, emerges into a stronger light.

At that point, Canada becomes politically involved whether we want to be or not — unless we simply decide to say goodbye to the Kurds with whom we have been working. But that would present its own difficulties, since as long as the Coalition remains involved, and Canada remains part of the Coalition, there will be no comfortable exit ramp.

Ottawa might wish to keep its hand on the forces identified by Sajjan on his African swing. It may need them somewhere else.

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